Last week, we introduced a new member of the Cresta team: Russell Banzon, new Chief Marketing Officer. As part of welcoming Russell to the team, we asked him some questions on his career journey, what drives him, and what a day in his life at Cresta looks like.
This inspired us to shine a spotlight on more Cresta team members – how they got here, what their day-to-day looks like, and why they’re excited about Cresta’s future. Today, we’re going to hear from Rich Wang, Vice President of Professional Services at Cresta. Read on to hear from Rich himself!
Tell us about yourself – what is your background?
I got my start in Customer Experience working in Implementations and Professional Services at Medallia, specializing in the retail, automotive and telecommunications industry. Working with brands like Lexus, Toyota, Apple, Verizon taught me the caliber of service that the Fortune 100 expects out of their technology partners, and how to think and act in terms of business results.
I then spent time at Box managing over $100M of ARR as a regional CSM leader, before I began a tour of duty building out Customer Success teams for various startups in the Virtual Reality, Manufacturing AI, & Home Construction categories to name a few. Most notable was that I spent almost 3 years building out the services & success motions at Observe.AI during the boom of the pandemic. Brands were turning to online support, there was a critical gap of contact center agent talent, and the need for AI platforms to augment agent performance was paramount. I helped the company scale through several funding rounds and started eight key functions within customer success.
What inspired you to join Cresta?
- Incredible market opportunity, buoyed by the generative AI wave: since the last time I was in this space, the major technological shift in the world is – of course – the seismic productivity boom enabled by GPT and generative AI. Every company in the world has an AI mandate of some form, and Cresta is poised to deliver services and products that help companies ensure they are on the cutting edge.
- Top-tier pedigree of customers, team, and investors: In a macro climate that is competitive for scale-ups, paying customers, and recruiting top talent, these attributes help ensure Cresta is leading the pack.
What is your role at Cresta? What does a typical day look like?
My job is to lead the Professional Services teams which include our customer strategy, implementations, solutions architecture, and customer engineering functions. Each function’s role is to drive repeatable success for our customers and also a common way of partnership for sales, customer success, and engineering.
Cresta has been driving success with so many customers over the years who have been learning AI for the first time, and my vision is to send a message to the market that at Cresta, our people are our differentiator along with our technology, and that they should work with Cresta for our thought leadership.
No two days here look the same – and I love that! It can be filled with checking in and advising our various implementation projects, rolling up my sleeves to join internal/external calls to help push things forward, partnering with engineering or sales to improve the ways our teams collaborate together in the future, and meeting our customers to ensure they’re getting what they were hoping out of Cresta and more.
What about the product got you excited?
The speed of engineering really got me excited – in my first few weeks meeting with every engineer, it’s clear they are genuinely interested in working with a customer directly to solve their problems – a breath of fresh air! The platform’s capabilities in solving agent pain points, driving real-time business KPIs, and the flourishing use cases in generative AI technologies were particularly exciting, showcasing Cresta’s depth and potential for future innovation.
What big trends in this space do you envision over the next year?
Generative AI is changing the game, we all know that – but specifically, the agent augmentation story will be supplanted by the AI transformation story. There will be a tipping point where AI-driven technologies, using the institutional knowledge and data, will begin to make decisions more accurately, faster, and with a human touch greater than what an agent alone could do. While I don’t think this will eliminate jobs per se, it will enable businesses to scale beyond the existing talent populations and contact centers where hiring is a bottleneck (and has been the case in many countries for years).
Cresta will lead the way in bridging the use cases beyond customer support and sales to driving and automating workflows. The concept of robotic process automation (RPA) has been missing in contact center businesses largely because of the technical hurdle of requiring engineers/sophisticated developers to create and maintain those automations; now with Cresta, this will be a few clicks of a button to maintain effortlessly. Business KPIs will see another huge jump in impact, buoyed by the next wave of innovation.
What do you think is the most important skill for a new Crestan to have?
Having ownership over solving problems for customers – even if it isn’t your “job”. I see this DNA trait in every Crestan that I’ve worked with; and would like to see that mindset continue as we continue to grow. .
What do you love to do with your time when you’re not leading Professional Services at Cresta?
You’ll find me scootering around the neighborhood and playing basketball with my 7-year-old son, trying out new barbecue and wok stir-fry recipes (please send me your killer dishes!), & traveling the world and experiencing new places through food & wine.
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Welcome to the team, Rich!
